On this day in Alabama history: Four Klansmen indicted in murder of Viola Liuzzo
Viola Liuzzo (1925-1965) aided protesters during the civil rights movement of the early 1960s in Alabama. She was killed in a Ku Klux Klan attack in 1965 and is the only white woman honored at the Montgomery Civil Rights Memorial. (Courtesy of Penny Liuzzo Herrington. Provided by Mary Stanton. Encyclopedia of Alabama)
April 6, 1965
State officials indicted four Klansmen in the murder of activist Viola Gregg Liuzzo on March 25. A 39-year-old white housewife and mother of five from Detroit, Liuzzo was gunned down by the Klansmen while ferrying protesters during the Selma to Montgomery march. Despite testimony by one of the Klansmen, Gary Thomas Rowe, as a paid FBI informant, Alabama juries cleared the remaining three men, who were then convicted and sentenced by federal juries to 10 years in prison for violating Liuzzo’s civil rights. In 1978, federal officials indicted Rowe for first-degree murder after new evidence surfaced that he shot Liuzzo, but the court dismissed the case based on his immunity. Liuzzo’s name is inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery.
Read more at Encyclopedia of Alabama.
Memorial to Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo. (The George F. Landegger Collection of Alabama Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
For more on Alabama’s Bicentennial, visit Alabama 200.
